Nightmares

I developed a new method of dealing with nightmares during my university research into sleep and dreams. Nightmare sufferers tend to have a rather nervous personality, and are more ready than most to recognise within a dream a scene that me be turning a little ‘nightmarish’. The thought then often happens, ‘Oh, here’s the nightmare!’

Now, unfortunately, the overarching law concerning dreams is that ‘What you think, you will then immediately dream’. So, it’s not surprising that the nightmare suddenly emerges – in a sense it has been ‘called’.

Using hypnotherapy, the procedure is to attempt to enable the client to transform the nightmare into a ‘lucid’ dream – in which the dreamer can control the events, and change the scene, say, to a pleasant desert island.

The dreamer’s ‘mind set’ is altered to: ‘Great! Here’s the nightmare. That means I’m dreaming, and I can control my dreams’. The incipient nightmare then, amazingly, may become a portal into the incredible inner universe of lucid dreaming.